Ethan Casey

Getting ready for 2009

2008-12-13T14:31:00.007Z

2009 promises to be a busy and productive year, and one of the things I'm doing to prepare for it is setting up this blog and redirecting the www.ethancasey.com domain here. This note is just to say that, and so that there will be some text on the front page while I get things arranged. If you'd like to be in touch with me for any reason, feel free to email ethan@ethancasey.com or phone +1 206 453 0139 (or Skype ID ethan.casey).

Ethan Casey's bio

2008-12-13T00:21:00.005Z

Ethan Casey is the author of Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time (London: Vision, 2004; Penguin India and Vanguard, 2005). Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, has called Alive and Well in Pakistan “magnificent,” Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid calls it “the insights of a singular, clear-eyed and humane traveler,” and Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat describes it as “wonderful … a model of travel writing.”

Ethan and his Chicago-based collaborator Fawad Butt are frequent public speakers on Pakistan and on issues affecting the subcontinent and its diaspora communities around North America. Since 2006, Ethan has spoken to World Affairs Councils in Alaska, Oregon, Illinois and Pennsylvania; at Human Development Foundation fundraisers in Chicago, San Jose, and Tampa; and at high schools in Chicago and churches in Colorado Springs and Seattle. He was the keynote speaker introducing philanthropist Greg Mortenson at an April 2008 fundraising dinner in Chicago, and introduced Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea co-author David Oliver Relin at a King County Library System event in Renton, Washington in October 2008.

He has also spoken at Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and other major universities, as well as at the Royal Geographical Society and the Pakistan High Commission in London. Ethan and Fawad are currently speaking mainly to American church and interfaith groups about the urgent need to foster human connections and understanding between Americans and Pakistanis.

Ethan fell into journalism the same way his role model, the late Observer foreign correspondent and travel writer Gavin Young, did: “the way a drunken man falls into a pond.” His first discovery of the world outside the United States, a trip to Haiti at age 16, spurred him to spend an academic year on the University of Wisconsin College Year in Nepal Program and later to move to Bangkok. His credo of journalism is that understanding should always precede both judgment and action, and he endorses James Fallows’s observation that journalists enjoy the privilege of getting paid to learn.

Between 1993 and 2001, Ethan traveled throughout Southeast Asia and the subcontinent, writing for publications including The Globe and Mail, the South China Morning Post, and US News & World Report. He interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi in April 1996, during her brief period out of house arrest; was an eyewitness to the July 1997 coup d’etat in Cambodia; interviewed Megawati Sukarnoputri (later President of Indonesia) in December 1996, during the last period of Suharto’s rule; interviewed Corazon Aquino on the 10th anniversary of the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos; was in Kathmandu in July 1994 for the fall of the first elected government of Nepal after the 1990 anti-royalist revolution and covered the November 1994 elections; and lived through the collapse of the Thai baht and other Asian currencies.

In 1994 he began covering the subcontinent, traveling around India by train and spending several extended periods in Jammu & Kashmir State near the height of the separatist rebellion there. His interest in Kashmir and in the subcontinent’s Muslims led him to visit Pakistan, where he interviewed Murtaza Bhutto, Benazir’s estranged brother; covered sectarian violence in Karachi and the plight of the country’s Christian minority; interviewed ordinary people as well as politicians and public figures such as Maleeha Lodhi (later Ambassador to the US and High Commissioner to the UK), Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin, Ahmed Rashid, and human rights lawyer Hina Jilani; and visited the Line of Control during the 1999 Kargil crisis. In 2003 he was invited to spend a semester as a founding faculty member of the School of Media and Communication at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore.

Based in London from 1998 until 2005, he continued traveling to Asia as well as covering the farms crisis in Zimbabwe in 2000 for Geographical magazine; speaking at the Highway Africa conference for African journalists in Johannesburg in August 2002; covering the Haitian elections of November 2000 for the Financial Times; and traveling to Pakistan in 1999 for the Observer News Service and the Boston Globe. In 1999 he co-founded Blue Ear, a pioneering online periodical publishing global journalism, which James Fallows praised as “ambitious” and “innovative.” During this period he also edited three book-length collections: 09/11 8:48 a.m.: Documenting America’s Greatest Tragedy (in collaboration with Jay Rosen and the New York University Department of Journalism), its sequel, Dispatches from a Wounded World (with Leah Kohlenberg), and Peace Fire: Fragments from the Israel-Palestine Story (with Paul Hilder).

In recent years Ethan has written for Pakistani and Indian publications, and in 2006-07 he co-founded and co-hosted a weekly topical podcast on Pakistan.

He is also co-author, with Michael Betzold, of Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story (1991), for which he had the memorable honor of interviewing Eugene McCarthy and Elmore Leonard. He lives in Seattle and can be contacted at ethan@ethancasey.com.

PakCast: A Weekly Audio Dialogue between Pakistan and the West

2006-07-16T18:47:00.000+01:00

Dear colleagues and friends,

It has been more than a month since I posted my column to this blog. Part of what I've been busy with has been preparing for the launch of my new venture PakCast: A Weekly Audio Dialogue between Pakistan and the West, which my colleague Nasir Aziz and I are now podcasting weekly out of Seattle.

Soon I'll be revamping the www.ethancasey.com website to put it to use in different ways. I'll also be moving my past columns to an archive on the new PakCast site, and integrating my column more closely with the PakCast podcast.

Stay tuned to this site, and I'll do my best to be in touch by email as appropriate and whenever possible. In the meantime, I invite you to listen weekly to PakCast, which Nasir and I are doing in partnership with the Toronto-based Rabble Podcast Network. We invite you to participate in PakCast, via voice mail and email. PakCast is available for download from iTunes, or you can listen to it without downloading on from www.pakcast.com.

Also, here's my most recent, published Tuesday, July 11:

Dangers of unchecked executive power

Best regards,

Ethan

The News: Rebranding Pakistan

2006-06-07T15:42:00.000+01:00

Here are the first three paragraphs of my latest column for The News, about a fascinating workshop in which I had the opportunity to take part:

"This past weekend I flew across North America twice in three days, in order to be a panelist at an all-day workshop in New York. 'Brand Pakistan: Developing & establishing a positive brand' was conceived and organised by the Association of Pakistani Professionals, a US-based group founded after the World Trade Centre attack to help foster more accurate and constructive coverage of Pakistan in the Western media.

"The panel was moderated by Adil Najam, a journalist who is now a professor in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Panellists included Mahreen Khan, former host of the BBC World show 'Question Time Pakistan' and now Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz's media advisor, who flew from Islamabad to take part; Danny Schechter, executive editor of MediaChannel.org; and Robin Thompson, senior branding advisor at Landor Associates.

"I was invited because my travel book Alive and Well in Pakistan aspires to humanise Pakistanis for a Western readership and to bridge the gulf in understanding and perspective between the West and the Muslim world -- as I also try to do weekly in this column. More than 100 Pakistani expatriates of all ages and walks of life attended and participated in the brand-building exercise in the afternoon. ..."

The full column is online here.

Last week's column, headlined "Some things are worth taking seriously," which I neglected to post last week, is online here.

The News: Making media matter

2006-05-25T02:56:00.000+01:00

I skipped posting last week, but didn't skip writing my column. Last week's column was an excerpt from the talk I gave at the Bellevue Library in Bellevue, Washington, USA, titled "The Price Pakistanis Have Paid". It (the excerpt) is online as last week's column, here.

"Why is tourism so important? One might argue that developing countries from Thailand to Nepal to Jamaica have been ravaged by tourism, and that Pakistan should count its blessings for having been spared its depredations. But in Pakistan's case a bit of Disneyfication might have been a small price to pay, in lieu of the isolation and stigma its people have suffered."

This week's column is about a remarkable conference I had the privilege to attend May 17-21 on Cortes Island, British Columbia, Canada, called "Media That Matters". It's online here.

"Despite the two countries' long border, few Americans make such connections or learn about such work in Canada, unless we actively seek it out. Matt Thompson, a Canadian writer, producer and online strategist, articulated to me another valuable aspect of the cross-border dimension. 'One of the reasons it's important that the conferences are in Canada is that Canadians understand Americans better than anyone else,' he said. 'And the reason for that is necessity. I think that's something unique that Canada can offer: rendering America more intelligible to the world.'"

The News: "Tear down that wall"

2006-05-09T23:33:00.000+01:00

My column this week for the Pakistani daily The News is on the immigration issue in the US, a topic I had been meaning to treat for several weeks. I found a fresh angle - my softball team:

"Mexico and Mexicans have been much in the news lately, here in the USA. Many Americans think it's a good idea to build a wall along the US-Mexico border, and some anti-immigrant vigilantes are rumoured to have impersonated Border Patrol officers. Two waves of huge, assertive marches by illegal immigrants and their supporters in cities nationwide seem to have seized the initiative in the public debate over immigrants and their role and rights in US society away from reactionaries in Congress, and may have launched a durable movement.

"To some Americans, that movement is offensive or terrifying. To me it's bracing. ..."

The full column is online here.

The News: Civilian control of the military

2006-05-02T15:59:00.000+01:00

This week's installment of my column in the leading Pakistani daily The News draws lessons from the history of Pakistan and quotes Bill Center, a retired US Navy rear admiral, on the issues currently being debated in the US about civilian control of the military:

"One of the unacknowledged truths of the 21st-century world is that countries we call 'developing' are in some ways ahead of 'developed' ones. These euphemistic adjectives assume a chronological forward movement which entail 'development' toward affluence and liberal democracy. But we know in our hearts that this is wishful mumbo-jumbo. Pakistanis know it from long and direct experience living under military rule. Americans are just beginning to smell the coffee.

"As A J P Taylor observed in his biography of Bismarck, the armed forces are a fundamental institution in any state, and it does no good to wish or pretend otherwise. Military takeovers occur when the civilian-led political system breaks down or loses legitimacy. ..."

The full column is online here.

The News column: Nepal's king has no clothes

2006-04-25T05:31:00.000+01:00

This week's installment of my "View from the West" column in the Pakistani daily The News is about the global context of the deepening crisis in Nepal, a country I lived in as a student for an academic year, nearly 20 years ago:

"We've grown so accustomed to living in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 that we forget that we're also still living amid the rubble of November 9, 1989. Midway between those dates, my mentor Ed Pettit predicted that the day would come when people wished the Berlin Wall had not fallen after all. Of course no one wishes that but, as grim a period as the Cold War was, it was also relatively stable.

"The Eastern Europeans led by example, and a strikingly disparate array of small peoples worldwide got the point. ... In an Asian society as tradition-bound and stratified as Nepal's, that's disorienting for all concerned, but it's also exhilarating. The Nepalis who forced the previously sacrosanct King Birendra to accept constitutional monarchy 16 years ago this month felt their own power, and saw its fruits. But what they ended up with was a corrupt mockery of democracy and a brutalising civil war."

The News has just launched a much more attractive and navigable new Internet edition. My full column is online here.

The News column: Shall the fundamentalists win?

2006-04-19T04:48:00.000+01:00

My column this week quotes at length from a sermon delivered by a liberal Christian clergyman in America, with a not-so-subtle implication that there are parallels to be drawn with the Muslim world, and an O. Henry-like twist at the end:

"The question whether America is a secular nation or in some quasi-official sense a Christian one is as old as the country itself. Muslims, Jews and other non-Christian Americans understandably feel a personal stake in the issue. The nature of Christianity itself has also been debated heatedly among American Christians, with consequences for public life."

The full column is online here.

The News column: Covering the chaos in Iraq

2006-04-11T19:08:00.000+01:00

After an unplanned two-week hiatus, I've resumed my weekly column for the leading Pakistani daily The News. This week's installment retails and comments on a recent long article by Orville Schell:

"The world described by Orville Schell in the April 6 issue of The New York Review of Books reads like a cross between the poignant Robin Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam and Evelyn Waugh's classic novel about foreign correspondents, Scoop - except without the humour. ...

"During my five years covering Asia based out of Bangkok, I learned that among foreign correspondents there exists a caste system. Staffers with major Western news organisations are the Brahmins, 'super-stringers' with retainers or well-paying regular gigs are the Kshatriyas, and self-funding freelancers are … well, you get the idea. If that was so in peacetime, imagine the crippling disadvantage freelancers -- who often are the most intrepid reporters, both physically and intellectually -- face today in Iraq."

My column is online here and includes a link to Schell's article (which obviously I recommend highly).

Seattle Pakistan talk, and 2-week column hiatus

2006-04-03T04:13:00.000+01:00

Dear colleagues and friends,

My weekly column in the Pakistani daily newspaper The News was not published last Tuesday (March 28) and will not be published this coming Tuesday (April 4), because of unforeseen circumstances. I'm expecting to resume it for publication Tuesday, April 11.

Also, contacts I've made in the Pakistani community around Seattle, where I'm now living, are organizing an event probably to be held either in Seattle or in Bellevue, Washington on April 29, at which I'll speak and have a q-and-a about my book, Alive and Well in Pakistan. You can expect to hear more about this from me within the next week or two. When you do, I hope you'll spread the word and help make the event well attended and successful. We're hoping for good local media coverage as well, of course.

I'm talking to contacts in several other US cities about planning and hosting similar events. More on these as they solidify, too. I hope to do many such events around the US, promoting Alive and Well in Pakistan and at the same time being useful by fulfilling my role as someone who can write and speak across the gulf that divides the West and the Islamic world, and who can humanize Muslims for Western audiences - as I've tried to do in my book.

If you have any ideas or contacts to offer, please email me at ethan@ethancasey.com or phone +1 206 734 4931.

The News column: What is America?

2006-03-26T21:12:00.000+01:00

With apologies, I'm posting late again this week - very late, in fact; just in time to post yet again a couple of days from now, when my next column is published in The News on Tuesday, March 28. My column for March 21, titled "What is America?", quotes from C.L.R. James's posthumously published book American Civilization, written in 1950:

The fear, the doubts are rooted in doubt and fear of the American system itself, fear and doubt of the ever-new conflicts and exacerbation of old ones that it ceaselessly breeds, and fear and doubt because both Western Europe and the millions in the Far East maintain a stiff and very often aggressive hostility to taking the achievements and traditions of America as a model. … Thus the greatest power in Western civilisation no longer knows what to believe about itself.

And I end the column by asking my mainly Pakistani readers:

What do you want to know or understand better about America, beyond the obvious or cliché? Please email me, and please be as concrete as possible.

My column is online here, and I can be reached by email at ethan@ethancasey.com.

The News column: Can you go home again?

2006-03-18T15:23:00.000Z

This week I'm very late posting a link to my column in the Pakistani paper The News, precisely because of the piece's own subject matter: my return, after 13 years living abroad, to the USA:

Now, after 13 years of expatriation, I'm returning home -- returning full circle. We'll see what I make of it, and what it makes of me. I think I know my own country --I feel and understand and appreciate and yearn for and pity it -- but at the same time it's true that for most of my adult life I've remained deliberately out of touch with it. There's so much about America that's exasperating: the foreign policy of course, but also the poisonously divisive domestic politics, the frivolous popular culture, the ubiquitous television, the fast food chains, the aggressive blandness of it all. I wanted none of it, so I got the hell out.

I'm driven to return partly by a felt compulsion toward intellectual and moral honesty. After 13 years spent moaning about one's country's from afar -- and apologising for it to disgruntled foreigners -- one begins feeling as if it has become an abstraction or a whipping boy. For better or worse, just as one left in the first place in order to experience the world at first hand, ultimately one must return for the same reason.

The full column is online here.

"Don't Block the Blog" movement in Pakistan

2006-03-07T18:01:00.000Z

My column for the Pakistani paper The News this week is, surprisingly, not about George Bush's visit to Pakistan (though I hope to touch on that belatedly next week), but rather on the protest launched late last week by two enterprising Pakistani bloggers when they learned the country's authorities were blocking accessing to blogs. In the words of one of them, Karachi dentist Dr Awab Alvi:

"On the 27th of February the [Pakistan Telecommunication Authority] decided to block all sites displaying the controversial cartoons of which a few sites were being hosted on the blogspot domain. The network administrator simply blocked off the entire domain. [It was] either a deliberate attempt or a simple mistake, but it's been five days with no solution. I continue to browse blogspot sites using a number of freely available proxies. ... I, along with all the blog publishers and blog readers, protest this censorship on freedom of expression."

More on this in my full 800-word column, headlined "Free speech is a global issue" and online here.

You can copy the code to display the logo below on your own website, should you wish, from the Help-Pakistan.com site.

Haiti: 2 years on, questions still unanswered

2006-03-02T18:41:00.000Z

It's been two years and a day since the February 29, 2004 overthrow of elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Last month elections took place in Haiti that sort of, more or less moved forward the dysfunctional and dangerous situation that has prevailed since then under a UN occupation and a US-installed interim prime minister, with the election of onetime Aristide ally and former president Rene Preval. Watch this space, though; things are still unstable and unpredictable in Haiti.

Meanwhile, I think it's a good moment to quote a passage from an article published in the 15 April 2004 London Review of Books by Dr. Paul Farmer, Harvard Medical School professor and founder of the bold and groundbreaking medical and public health organization Partners in Health. Farmer asked these questions two years ago, and they still haven't been answered:

Did the U.S. and France have a hand in Aristide’s removal? Were he and his wife being held against their will? … Many more questions remain unanswered. We know that U.S. funds overtly financed the opposition, but did they also fund, even indirectly, the rebellion, which featured high-powered U.S. weapons only a year after twenty thousand such weapons were promised to the Dominican Republic? Senator Christopher Dodd is urging an investigation of U.S. training sessions for six hundred "rebels" in the Dominican Republic, and wants to find out "how the [International Republican Institute] spent $1.2 million of taxpayers' money" in Haiti. Answering these and related questions would take an intrepid investigative reporter, rather than a physician like myself, working, with some trepidation, in central Haiti. It would need a reporter willing to take on hard questions about U.S. policies in Latin America.

To learn about Farmer and his work in Haiti, Peru, Russia and Rwanda, read Tracy Kidder's excellent book Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Truth, tact and terror

2006-02-28T08:37:00.000Z

My column in The News, Pakistan's leading daily newspaper in English, is published every Tuesday. The latest installment, headlined "Truth, tact and terror," is about what can happen when public events and private lives intersect - the personal fallout, including damaged friendships. I start by noting a recent Los Angeles Times interview with George Holliday, the eyewitness who videotaped the Rodney King beating 15 years ago this Friday in Los Angeles, discuss a friendship of my own that has been damaged by something I wrote about Pakistan, and end with an allusion to the excellent recent film about Edward R. Murrow, Good Night, and Good Luck. My column is online here.

Ahmed Rashid: bin Laden is in Pakistan

2006-02-26T19:53:00.000Z

Sunday's Washington Post includes a typically lucid and well-informed article by Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist whose well-timed book Taliban (published in 2000 by Yale University Press) justly became a bestseller, pointing out that Osama bin Laden is almost certainly in Pakistan. The article is highly critical of both the US and the Pakistani government. Noting that bin Laden was last seen in public in Jalalabad in Afghanistan in November 2001, he writes:

Few Afghan Pashtuns would have dared to betray him then. But times have changed in Afghanistan. The majority of Afghan Pashtuns now want the benefits of peace -- economic development, roads and schools.

Pakistan's Pashtuns, by contrast, have become more radicalized than they ever were before 9/11. And the bloody Taliban-al Qaeda resurgence now under way has relied on Pakistan's Pashtun belt for most of its recruitment, logistics, weapons and funding.

Ahmed Rashid has been reporting from and about Afghanistan for something like 25 years, and his views deserve to be taken very seriously by anyone wanting to know what's really going on there and in Pakistan. Since the fall of the Taliban, he has been consistently pessimistic about Pakistan in particular, notably in an October 10, 2002 article in The New York Review of Books. In October 2003, for my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, I asked him if he would rethink that article - if perhaps he had overplayed his strong assertions. No, he replied:

There's a very swift deterioration, if you look at all indicators. Has fundamentalism been checked since 9/11? No, it hasn't. [Afghanistan] is very bad. The whole of this year there's been enormous neglect. The money hasn't come. The international peacekeepers haven't come. And then course Iraq, which has preoccupied the world for the last year. The Taliban are resurgent. The economic resurgence hasn't begun. The warlords are still rampant. I think Iraq has had a hugely negative effect on Afghanistan. And the effect on Pakistan has been that it's led to a huge upsurge in anti-Westernism. It's had more of an impact than even the war in Aghanistan, which was next door.

Muslims and the West: talking past each other

2006-02-21T09:32:00.000Z

On February 12 I posted a piece here that I titled "This is not about press freedom", as a response to a terrible article by Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute about the Danish cartoons controversy, called "This Is Not about Mohammed's Turban". (My piece links to Radu's piece.) Since then the controversy has moved on, and so have my views. I still think Michael Radu's piece is terrible and that Flemming Rose, the editor who commissioned the cartoons, acted foolishly and irresponsibly. But I've read Rose's defense of his decision and responded to it in my just-resumed weekly column for Pakistan's leading daily newspaper, The News:

[Rose] and the Muslim world are talking past each other. This is clear from the distinction Rose makes between 'radical' Muslims -- those 'propagating shariah law', in his words -- and 'moderate' Muslims, who "accept the rule of secular law". In his national and cultural context, Rose is not wrong to use such definitions. But they don't readily translate into an Islamic idiom, do they? At any rate, the best argument against his decision to publish the cartoons in the first place is this: In the current world climate, why go out of your way to stir things up?

You can read my full 800-word column here. I appreciate the opportunity the column gives me to be a bridge between the West and the Muslim world. (I also appreciate my editors' forebearance during my recent and unexpected five-month hiatus.) The News publishes my column under the rubric "View from the West", and I'll be linking to it on this blog every Tuesday.

Who gets to practice journalism?

2006-02-20T13:47:00.000Z

Saturday's Washington Post included columnist Colbert I. King's piece "Some Are Less 'Newsworthy' Than Others," which drew lessons from his paper's failure to report the November 2003 disappearance of black DC resident Marion Fye:

The decision to go with one story rather than another turns on what we in this business consider "newsworthy." It's an amorphous term, but editors claim to know it when they see it. Unfortunately, in my view, that decision seems to boil down to what those of us in newsrooms, and not readers, care about. …

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for not publishing a report. For example, the missing person is found before the story goes to press. But the fact is that inner-city events that some editors regard as routine -- the loss of a young man to gunfire, a mom separated from her children, kids left to fend for themselves -- are the kind of issues that people who live in those communities really care about.

I don't disagree with King, but I found his piece rather instructively myopic. For all his well-intentioned hand-wringing about the chronic disconnect between the Washington establishment (including the Post) and the majority of people who actually live in the city of Washington, King remains invested in a top-down, green eyeshade-era view of who is entitled or enabled to practice journalism. This blog and many others give the lie to the presumption that "we" have to sit around and wait for "them" to cover any event before it counts as newsworthy. I fully buy my sometime collaborator Jay Rosen's new gospel of do-it-yourself digital journalism: if the Washington Post isn't covering what you want covered, don't whine; get the word out yourself.

On a related note, Sunday's Los Angeles Times includes a fascinating interview with George Holliday, the man who shot the video of LA police beating Rodney King, 15 years ago March 3:

He has had problems, though it's hard to say how many of them have to do with his decision to make the video public. When we talked about it, he didn't spread the blame around. But he didn't have kind words for the media. He may have pioneered "citizen journalism," but he feels that he was swallowed up and spit out by CNN and the like, which, he said, gave him little credit and no compensation for his contribution to history. "I don't watch the news or read the papers anymore."

Siva Vaidhyanathan on "social networking"

2006-02-19T16:40:00.000Z

Last week my friend Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of Culture and Communication at New York University, played the straight man to Jon Stewart's young sidekick on a feature on The Daily Show about "social networking" online. The very funny six-minute video is online here.

Book: O-Zone by Paul Theroux

2006-02-16T11:59:00.000Z

I've just finished reading O-Zone, Paul Theroux's dystopian novel published in 1986. New York City is a walled fortress; the American population is divided into "Owners" and "aliens"; part of Missouri has been sealed off and renamed "Outer Zone" or O-Zone after a massive nuclear accident; the long-awaited Big One (earthquake, that is) has devastated part of California. The rest of the world is mostly offstage but sounds even worse.

O-Zone is not as good as Theroux's first-rate signature novel, The Mosquito Coast, but it comes from the same period of his career and is informed by a similar sensibility. Reading it, I reflected how the apocalyptic tendency in American writing is so very different from anything one finds in British literature. I think this is because, for all its flaws and annoyances, Britain is a much more deeply rooted and stable society than the USA ever was or will be. Americans have a historical memory of a time before we "sivilized" (Huck Finn's spelling) the landscape and killed off the original inhabitants, and we can all too readily imagine a future time when the whole American enterprise will have collapsed. This is what Theroux is doing in O-Zone: being, as he puts it elsewhere (and apropos not his fiction but his travel writing), "prescient without making predictions".

Part of what makes Theroux a hero and role model for me is that his career proves that it's possible for an American writer to be at once unapologetically American and genuinely cosmopolitan. I think he's wonderful and can readily forgive him the somewhat clunky plot of this long novel, which redeems itself in the last 50 or so pages. It's also interesting to read a science fiction novel published 20 years ago and purporting to be about what was then the near future. In O-Zone people send each other faxes and use public phones; no email, no cell phones. But one of the characters is a retail mogul who has shut down his stores and moved his printed catalogue onto the cable network; the paragraph describing it reads almost like a business plan for Amazon.com!

Like all serious science fiction, O-Zone is really about the real world we actually live in. Here's a passage near the end that I think sums up its themes:

She thought of Holly, planning another party, sitting with her googly tits pressed against the gaping window of her dress, and saying confidently O-Zone is nowhere. Moura smiled: No. O-Zone is not a wilderness or a riddle - it was a condition and it was probably eternal, and it was everywhere. O-Zone was the world. … She liked the feeling that she had been here before, not only in the way that the New Year's party had prepared her for everything, but also in the sense that New York, too, was another part of O-Zone. But you had to have seen O-Zone to know that.

BBC Haiti photos

2006-02-15T13:08:00.000Z

The BBC published some interesting photos from Haiti on Tuesday, of post-election protests. The most telling are the two taken at the expensive Hotel Montana, which has a swimming pool and whose deck commands a sweeping view of Port-au-Prince, the bay, and the hills around.

William Pfaff on "The Long War"

2006-02-14T11:58:00.000Z

I've always had a lot of time for the International Herald Tribune columnist William Pfaff, who reads and thinks a lot and who never pulls punches. In his February 11 column, Pfaff writes:

There are a great many dismaying aspects of Bush's Washington, but nothing more so than this combination of the unachievable with the hortatory in giving a name and purpose to the military campaigns that already have the U.S. Army and Marine Corps near exhaustion, and a major part of the world in turmoil. ...
Al Qaeda and individual international terrorists are the object of worldwide intelligence and police operations. They are a marginal phenomenon. The Bush administration's conflation of them with the social upheaval in their world is exploited to perpetuate changes in American society that provide a much more sinister threat to democracy than anything ever dreamed by Osama bin Laden.
The radical threat to the United States is at home.

Thanks to Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte, professor of journalism at the University of Texas, for bringing this piece to my attention.

Pakistan: A gratifying review

2006-02-14T11:01:00.000Z

Professor Nilofer Sultana, a Pakistani living in Arizona in the US, has just brought my attention to her review of my book Alive and Well in Pakistan, published this past Sunday in the leading Pakistani daily Dawn. My main conscious intention in writing the book was to humanize Pakistanis and Muslims generally for Western readers, but the most surprising pleasure I've found since its publication has been in learning that Pakistanis themselves appreciate what they see as an honest and fond portrayal of their troubled but highly likeable country. Professor Sultana writes:

It is a pleasure to read Casey’s memorable experiences with his students. He freely discusses Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, General Musharraf and [the play] Moulin Rouge with them. … Casey accepts the fact that Pakistanis take their foibles easily. He creates an aura of geniality around him. He very aptly says, "I want to write a book of journalism and contemporary history - a portrayal of this country in this historical moment but one that people will still want to read 10 or 20 years from now." He certainly lived up to his word.

Haiti: An ungovernable rage

2006-02-13T10:36:00.000Z

As Amy Wilentz put it in her flawed but important book The Rainy Season: Haiti since Duvalier, in Haiti a people's victory is often not what it seems, and if you wait a while things look different. (She said it more eloquently than that, but I don't have her exact words to hand.) I awoke Monday to the news that former president Rene Preval, who through the weekend seemed to have won nearly two-thirds of the vote in Haiti's February 7 election, is now below the 50% he needs to avoid a runoff, with 75% of the votes allegedly counted.

The New York Times reports the story in its inimitably disingenuous, poker-faced way. Charles Arthur's Haiti Support Group is blunter:

"13 February - In results that critics slammed as fraudulent, René Préval, a former president and champion of the poor who is the front-runner in key presidential elections here, appeared last night to have lost the majority he needs to avoid a runoff with his closest rival. Thousands of enraged, slum-dwelling Préval supporters took to the streets of this capital city to blow horns and bang drums in protest as they shouted, 'Préval on the first round!' Two members of the provisional electoral council overseeing the count from Tuesday's vote said they believed the results were being manipulated."

In her book and throughout her long involvement with Haiti, Amy Wilentz wrestled with her own leftist political faith: there should be popular democracy, so therefore there will be. This dilemma is not unique to Haiti; in Haiti it's only uniquely stark and in your face. I and many others - such as David Horowitz (see my Feb. 12 review of his book The End of Time) - have tried to square the same circle in the world at large.

Regarding Haiti in particular, as I consider the book Reed Lindsay and I are planning to write, I find myself reaching for a vocabulary that will frame the Big Questions that are universal but, as always, most starkly posed in Haiti, in some way that's not utterly stale. I suppose the best m.o. will be to remain as close to the ground as possible, to narrate what we know or believe to be facts, and let them tell the story. Meanwhile, it's too easy to say things are murky and complex in Haiti. In some important ways, the issue is very simple and clear indeed: there is a chronic, low-level war between the rich and the poor (and not only in Haiti). No writer has articulated this better than Brian Moore, in his prescient 1993 novel No Other Life:

It is now ten years since that day when Jeannot [the character based on Jean-Bertrand Aristide] seemed to disappear from this earth. There has been no revolution but, to the dismay of the elite and the Army, an ungovernable rage and resentment consumes the daily lives of the poor. Nothing has changed. The system is, as always, totally corrupt. The poor are its victims. His name is never mentioned among the elite but the mystery of his disappearance sits under the arrogance and privilege of their lives, like a dangerous earthquake fault.

Mutual admiration dept.

2006-02-13T00:54:00.000Z

My former Blue Ear colleague Tim Walker in Austin, Texas had very kind words for this project on its very first day of real existence:

"I've long taken it as an axiom that one thing the world needs more of is Ethan Casey's journalism. Ethan's an old friend and colleague; I was for several years a proud participant in his brainchild, Blue Ear, which helped me develop my writing chops as much as anything in my life. The good news is that Ethan's now online with a blog that's more than just a blog. It bears the hallmarks of his international experience and, above all, his thought. The man actually thinks."

This of course prompted me to visit Tim's blog, which he calls "TW's Outboard Brain". Tim actually thinks too, and is a very talented and principled writer who deserves to and will be a presence in American and world letters for many years to come. Another sample - Tim quoting the actress Uma Thurman, from a recent interview in Esquire magazine:

"It just comes back to being present and having a tremendous work ethic and accepting failure as a necessity for learning. None of it's final anyway. When it works, it's not final, and when it fails, it's not final. There's always another move."

Good advice for me to take to bed with me tonight (nearly 1 a.m. here in England as I write this), since lately I've been experiencing more failure than success. None of it's final anyway!

Thanks, Tim.

This is not about press freedom

2006-02-12T14:00:00.000Z

A few days ago a friend brought to my attention an article by Michael Radu of the Foreign Policy Research Institute:

"This Is Not about Mohammed's Turban"

I found the article awful: intellectually mediocre and, more to the point, badly misguided. Radu says the Danish-Mohammed-cartoons controversy "has made it clear that most Muslims simply do not comprehend but nevertheless oppose Western democratic values and diversity". Bull. Much clearer is that the self-righteous liberal Westerners who are so up in arms on the Danish newspaper's behalf simply do not comprehend how profoundly offensive it is to Muslims - including the many non-extremist ones - to make any picture of the Prophet Mohammed, much less a cartoon making fun of him.

In 1995 in Muzaffarabad - the capital of the Pakistani-held portion of Kashmir, now destroyed by the recent earthquake - I was having a conversation in my hotel room with a local government official who was responsible for showing me around, when he noticed a copy of a book I had left on the floor, titled Mohammed and the Quran. Diffidently and politely, he asked me to pick it up and not to leave it on the floor. Such sensibilities are superstitious, even anti-Islamic (because Islam is theoretically an iconoclastic religion, which incidentally is also why images of the Prophet are deeply frowned upon), but of course I felt awful about having wounded them. What is wrong with exercising discretion and tact in such things?

I think the Danish editor used extremely poor judgment. He should have quietly refused to publish the cartoons. I'm all for press freedom, but this isn't really about that, any more than the Judith Miller thing is about protecting anonymous sources. What makes the point all the more salient is that the same editor previously declined to publish cartoons of Jesus because, that's right, he thought they might cause offense.

Muslims shouldn't threaten violence or attack embassies, but what this controversy really reveals is how poorly the West understands Islam and Muslim sensibilities, and even moreso how little respect we really have for an entire civilization and history that is crucially important to more than a billion people worldwide.

Book: The End of Time by David Horowitz

2006-02-12T13:46:00.000Z

My father gave me The End of Time by David Horowitz for Christmas, along with Thomas Friedman's new book The World Is Flat. I've read The End of Time first, because it's shorter. Much shorter: only 155 pages. Horowitz is famous, or infamous, as a former left-winger turned right-wing American controversialist.

I had never before taken much interest in him one way or the other. I think my father gave me the book because it's a man's reflections on aging (I recently turned 40) and on coming to terms with death, the world's stubborn imperfectibility, and life's limitations. Horowitz reflects movingly on Pascal's Pensees and boldly and persuasively connects the personal theme of his own prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment with the contemporaneous global political event of the World Trade Center attack.

And he connects the terrorists' motivations with those of his own father, a believing socialist and tacit apologist for Stalin:

Like Mohammed Atta we long for the judgment that will make right what is not. We want to see virtue rewarded and the wicked rebuked. We yearn for release from the frustrations and disappointments of an imperfect life. … Like my father, I once thought I knew the answers to unanswerable questions, and allowed myself to dream impossible dreams. But one day these dreams brought tragedy to my door, and I put away the illusion for good. Whoever asks how Mohammed Atta's awful deed can be linked to decent people has not understood the deed, or who they themselves are. Ask yourself this: Up to the last act of Mohammed Atta's life, would he have been judged an evil person? No one who actually knew him thinks so. … He appears to have been an ordinary man who was seduced into committing a great crime in the name of a greater good.

Book: The Brethren by John Grisham

2006-02-12T12:02:00.000Z

John Grisham gets a bad rap, especially from literary snobs but even from people who enjoyed reading him but call him formulaic. He can be formulaic, but only when he's under deadline pressure. My theory is that during the 1990s he found himself on a commercial treadmill where his publisher was pressing him for a novel a year. One can discern a pattern where he was writing one good and relatively non-formulaic novel, then a formulaic one, then another good one, another formulaic one, etc. The best Grisham novels in my opinion are A Time to Kill (his first and, in some ways, still his best, despite being a bit rough around the edges), The Chamber, The Testament, The Last Juror and his latest, The Broker. The one that breaks the mold - and the very best of all his books - is A Painted House, a lovely story of childhood in the provincial South in the 1950s.

All of which is prelude to saying that I've just finished reading The Brethren, published in 2000. It's not one of Grisham's very best, but it's not a bad one like The Street Lawyer either. The Brethren is formulaic but good. It's especially impressive to read it more than five years after it was published and appreciate the prescience of its themes: Islamist terrorism and post-Cold War geopolitics, a fixed US presidential election. It's also interesting to note how the character Teddy Maynard, the long-serving, wheelchair-bound CIA director (seemingly loosely based on J. Edgar Hoover), recurs later in The Broker. I get the sense Grisham is trying to move away from his earlier lawyer books and toward novels with more international themes, which is all to the good. I really admire his ambition to make the most of his commercial good fortune by stretching himself and developing his storytelling craft. To my mind, Grisham is the best kind of popular novelist.